Lebanon’s resistance movement Hezbollah has warned it would expand the anti-Israel front in the south if the occupying regime pressed ahead with its acts of aggression against the Lebanese territory and the Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah made the remarks in a televised speech at a ceremony held by the Lebanese resistance movement in honor of Lebanon’s wounded and captured resistance fighters. The speech was broadcast live from the Lebanese capital city of Beirut on Tuesday.
Nasrallah praised the sacrifices of resistance fighters and said, “The wounds and blood have generated real achievements for our people and our country.”
“Our responsibility is to preserve these achievements.”
On Israel’s months-long savagery in the besieged Gaza Strip and the regime’s sporadic shelling of southern Lebanon, the Hezbollah chief said, “The existence of Israel is a disaster for the entire region and a fearful and deterred Israel represents a less dangerous and harmful situation for the people of the region.”
“In light of what is happening in Gaza, the Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian, and Egyptian national interests require that Israel emerge from this battle defeated and broken.”
Nasrallah said the exchanges of fire in Lebanon’s south would stop when the aggression against Gaza stops. “The resistance’s job is to deter the enemy, and our responses will be proportionate.”
“Whoever threatens us with expansion of the war, we threaten them similarly; and whoever thinks Lebanon’s resistance is – even for a single moment – in fear or confused is completely mistaken.”
“The resistance today is stronger in its determination to confront the enemy,” Nasrallah stated.
The Hezbollah chief said hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers already displaced from the north of the occupied territories would not be able to return to settlements in case of an escalation and an expansion of war zone.
The secretary-general of Hezbollah said it was a “moral and religious” duty shouldered by the Lebanese resistance movement to strike the Israeli-occupied territories in support of the Palestinians in Gaza.
“What we see today is primarily a sincere response on moral and religious grounds,” Nasrallah said. “What we are doing on the Lebanese front is primarily a national responsibility to prevent the victory of Israel.”
The Hezbollah leader said Israel has gained nothing but failure over the past few months of bloody hostilities in Gaza.
While praising the “legendary steadfastness” of the resistance fighters in Gaza, Nasrallah said, “What is happening in Gaza must shake the conscience of all people in the world, and they must feel responsible for the humanitarian catastrophe.”
Israel launched the war on October 7, 2023, after Palestinian resistance groups conducted the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the regime’s decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation.
The regime has killed at least 28,000 people, the majority of whom women and children, in Gaza ever since. Over 68,000 people have also been injured.
